Here’s the text for the 8 September 2025 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Scott Mills on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

School’s back in, which got me thinking about the only time I ever did organised sport. Aged fourteen, I joined the high-school cross-country team. And I discovered a love of running — even if I didn’t love our coach, who stood on the sidelines and bellowed at us like a drill sergeant. Despite his mansplaining, though, I still remember one thing he taught me. “Hall!” he’d squawk — he only ever used our surnames. “Hall! Stop watching your feet! Look up and watch the horizon!”

Thirty-six years later, I still practise that advice. Lift up your eyes from your socks to the skies: it opens up your body, and helps your spirit rise.

I heard someone say: in London, it’s only tourists who look up. The rest of us locals keep our eyes glued to the pavement. That’s me: head down, rushing to a meeting, running for the bus. And I forget that the best stuff often is not at street level, but a storey or two up — architectural beauty, faded adverts for old shops, peregrine falcons nesting atop the Houses of Parliament.

And you don’t have to be in a city to know that “up” is interesting. Ask any kid lying on their back under a tree, watching autumn leaves fall.

In Christian worship, there’s an ancient ritual called Holy Communion — we eat bread and drink wine together to remember that Jesus did the same thing 2000 years ago with his friends. But it’s not just a memory. When we share Holy Communion we believe Jesus is actually present at the table now, coming to us as a friend now.

One of the first lines of the ritual is “sursum corda”. Sounds like a Harry Potter spell, but it’s Latin from a second-century Christian prayer. “Sursum corda” is translated “Lift up your hearts” – but the Latin literally means: Up, hearts! Or Hearts up!

I love that. I need that. Because I get stalled out sometimes — my outlook stuck on the pavement, my attitude stuck in my anxious head.

But Up hearts! It breaks me out of the gridlock. Not to ignore the challenges of life, but to catch sight of a different dimension of life filtering through those challenges.

Up hearts! Thanks to the advice of my high-school running coach, and the wisdom of Jesus, my life coach, I’m learning to to lift my self, my soul, my wholehearted life to the horizon — and to trust that God, the divine friend, is on the way.